Decent People
by forever-ioand-ever
Summary: We only show the world a part of who we truly are, the fullness of ourselves only revealed in our darkest moments. A decent woman, without a clue as to why her husband is in limbo between life and death. A decent man whose fear is slowly getting the better of him. And a formerly decent man who only needs a push in the right direction to realize the decency that remains within.


_I had an idea... and you might wonder how it's Forever at first... just keep reading(:_

* * *

The entire staff didn't know what to make of him. The man that dutifully showed up to the bedside of a practically comatose man for whom there was feeble hope, if any at all. The man that, when asked about to the other family members, was as much of a mystery to them as he was to the staff.

So it would only make sense that, at some point, this mysterious man would appear when she was visiting.

Jillian always took a minute or two before she went in to see him, to gather her thoughts and her words, to have a script ready to spout out, just to keep her emotions in check. The doctors said he could still hear, maybe even see, and she didn't want him to hear how utterly desperate she had become, how hopeless she felt when she saw him hooked up to all the tubes and wires. And she definitely didn't want him to hear that undertone of anger in her voice, that anger that had only become stronger as the days and weeks passed.

Someone had done this to her Lewis, and whoever it was, they were going to pay.

Jillian took a seat in the half-empty waiting room of the ICU. She did her best to let herself relax into the hospital's halfhearted attempt at cushioned chairs. Running a hand through her blonde bob a la L'Oréal, she wondered again how on earth this had happened to her.

She knew he had enemies. He couldn't work in the most high-security psychiatric hospital without having some. And, taking that into account, these were not your run-of-the-mill bullies. They were mentally deranged psychopaths who were capable of anything, yet looked as innocent as the most selfless person on Earth.

She barely noticed when a man not much older than her came out of the ICU's swinging door and took a seat one away from her own. He quietly muttered something to himself, something about why he kept doing this to himself.

He looked over at Jillian and somewhere in the back of his mind, a flicker of recognition flared. Almost imperceptible, this recognition was, and he consciously dismissed it as the deja vu accumulated over his many years of life. Subconsciously, he knew he had seen her before, somewhere, somehow.

Jillian looked down to her lap. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and remained in that position for a short eternity. To an outside observer, it looked as if she were praying. And maybe, in a way, she was. Gathering her thoughts and repeating them was implicitly a prayer for courage, for strength, for endurance, because heaven knows she couldn't make it through this ordeal without at least a little divine assistance.

She at last pushed herself up from the chair, putting more force behind the motion than she actually needed to, as if the very idea of entering the Intensive Care ward was still an unthinkable reality she refused to acknowledge. The man who had just left the ward continued to watch her as she checked in at the nurse's station and proceeded into the locked corridor.

Each step she took had to be deliberate. If she thought for even a moment about what lied at the end of her journey, she didn't know what she would do. The scars were still too deep to tell whether or not they would heal. _Step, left, step, right. Step, left, step, right._

 _Lewis, darling, it's me. Jillian._

Step, left, step, right.

 _Annabel's team won their game last night. That was the big one, against their rival... Remember how excited she was for that? You would have been so proud of her._

Step, left.

 _They want to come in and see you. The girls. But they're too young._

Step, right.

 _I've been working on another deal with Mulaney. I think this time his firm might just finally come through. Then again, Mulaney couldn't stay true to his word if his life depended on it._

Step, left.

 _I miss you, Lewis. So do the girls._

Step, right.

 _I'll see you tomorrow, darling._

Step, step, step.

{•*•*•*•}

When Jillian returned through the ICU doors, she looked every ounce of emotional exhaustion she felt. Her eyes were red with tears, her mascara smudged from her attempts to control them. Every line of her face became more defined. Her shoulders sagged and she lifted her feet as if they were blocks of cement.

She took a seat in the same chair as before, where, one seat between them, still sat the man from earlier. She looked over at him and tried to fake a smile. The halfhearted rise of the corner of her mouth couldn't fool the observant man for a second.

"You don't want to be here."

Jillian looked curiously at the man. "No, of course not. I'd definitely prefer my husband to be at home with his wife and daughters than to be lying in limbo in a hospital bed."

"That's not what I'm saying. I didn't ask about your husband, I said that _you_ don't want to be here."

She didn't know who on Earth he was, but this perfect stranger had hit the nail on the head. She couldn't take it anymore; seeing Lewis lying there, day in, day out, still frozen in his uncommunicative vortex. She wanted desperately to have hope, but the ability to hope was slowly waning, slowly fading, and had dried up to almost nothing. Coming in, seeing him hooked up to all the tubes and wires, hearing nothing positive from the doctors, and yet having to summon this falsified hope and optimism that everything will be okay... It was pure agony.

"...and you think to yourself, why am I even doing this? You think it will help you heal, but it just keeps scoring the wounds open anew." The man then rose from the chair, straightened the maroon scarf about his neck, and left the waiting room.

Jillian remained, pondering her situation. It was, indeed, slowly destroying her to see her husband, day in and day out, lying barely on this side of comatose, with no change for the better or the worse. _It would be easier_ , she thought, _if he were actually dying_. Then at least she would know for certain that the end was near. But no, he was instead stuck in limbo, practically dead but with no medical reasons to progress further into that dark night. The scrap of life which he held onto was made of the most resilient material, and though he didn't consciously know it, he was clinging to diamond with an iron fist. Nothing could break him, nothing could save him.

Across the room at the nurses' station, the two young women in charge of signing people into the hall whispered quietly to each other, ever so often stealing a glance at the wounded wife and the mysterious man. Perhaps they did know each other after all, they thought. They seem to be getting on as well as could be expected in this environment. One suggested that, after he left, they should tell her who the man was. The other dissuaded her, surely the wife knew him already, there was no need to get her worked up over nothing.

And so Jillian and the man went their separate ways, until a patch of darkness brought them together once again.

{•*•*•*•}

That patch of dark was a freak city-wide power outage. When the lights shut off, Jillian's first instinct was to comfort her two young daughters, the younger of whom was especially frightened of the dark. She ran into their bedroom to find both girls fast asleep. She was at peace, but for only a moment. Because the next thought that crossed her mind was the idea that the power had cut her husband's life support.

{•*•*•*•}

Henry Morgan was down in his lab when the lights cut out. And, at first, nothing seemed amiss to him, because he always lit a lantern in the lab in the case of this very matter. And he was rather used to working by the flickering light of the oil-wick, especially in dark and dank places like the stone-walled basements of New York City. In short, he had learned to mistrust the power of electricity, and he was rather right in doing so.

What he'd forgotten was exactly how much trust he had recently vested into commercial electricity. And when he realized it, he leapt up, grabbed his lantern and a small duffel bag, and left the apartment without so much as a goodbye.

{•*•*•*•}

She hated to wake the girls. But at this time of night, it was impossible and downright rude to find someone to watch them. And she didn't exactly trust any of their neighbors to the task. So Jillian reluctantly roused the girls, who in turn reluctantly rose from bed and followed her out to the car. They still wore their pajamas, and she'd forgotten to get them shoes, and she was rather too worried about something much more important to bother going back in the apartment for them.

She broke as many driving laws as she possibly could. It helped that it was dark, no one dared navigate the city streets without aid of the blaring advertisements to light their way. It was only about halfway through the drive that her girls were awake enough to inquire what was going on.

"We have to go check on Daddy," Jillian barely managed to sound calm. Her heart was racing a mile a minute and her hands shook on the steering wheel.

"Is… is he gonna be okay?" the younger of her two girls asked. Jillian couldn't bear to see the girl's frightened expression, or her own fragile facade might shatter. No, she couldn't have that happen. So she kept her eyes straight ahead on the road before them.

"He's fine, Juliette. I promise."

Never had she told so blatant a lie in her life.

{•*•*•*•}

It had been too long.

Henry stood by the East River, lantern in one hand, bag in the other, watching the moonlight dance across the water. It was calming, but eerie at the same time. There should be the reflections of marquees, the echoes of drunken laughter, the sweeping beam of light to check for riffraff in the waters.

There was nothing. Not even the fainest sign of life. A car whizzed by, reminding Henry that he wasn't back in the nineteenth century, waiting at the docks for his father's ship to arrive. He'd spent many a night in his youth out on the coast of Wales, a candle or lantern burning beside him, waiting to welcome his father back home.

Why he should think about that at this moment was unfathomable. He was here with a very specific intent and purpose, he must stick to it.

His eyes made another few passes across the waters, still no sign of life. The power had been out long enough now that either what he feared had already moved on, or simply hadn't happened.

And there was no way he wasn't going back to that hospital to check.

{•*•*•*•}

Jillian was able to at last breathe a sigh of relief when she turned into the hospital and saw that they, by some miracle, still had power. She parked the car in the desolate lot and, with her daughters in tow, made her way into the building and up to the ICU.

"Now, you girls be good for Mommy, okay?" Jillian said to the two little brunettes when they reached the ICU waiting room. "I have to go check on Daddy. Just stay right here, okay?"

Annabel and Juliette nodded, still confused by the night's events to do anything more. Jillian asked the nurse to keep an eye on them as she went through the doorway into her husband's hall.

She didn't have to think about her steps this time, nor what she was going to say. This time, she knew, either he would hear sheer gratitude or hear nothing at all.

Jillian swung open the door to her husband's room to see a doctor leaning over the bed. She clutched at her heart in the sheer panic that the unthinkable had happened. Her eyes were wide with desperation as she silently beseeched the white-coated professional.

The doctor saw the panic in her eyes and immediately consoled her. "He's stable."

Jillian's whole body relaxed, her legs became too weak to hold her upright. "Oh, thank God! Thank God! Lewis, I thought I lost you!"

She fell at the side of his bed, sobbing an incoherent thank you to the powers that be. The doctor quietly stepped out of the room and let Jillian and her husband be.

{•*•*•*•}

Henry didn't want to appear too frazzled. Then again, a man in a lab coat and a fine scarf, carrying a recently-extinguished oil lamp and running into the Intensive Care ward of a hospital in the long hours of the night couldn't help but appear frazzled.

The nurses gave him a strange glance, but, upon recognizing the mysterious man under the queer clothing, seemed to dismiss him. They did, however, bar him from entering the hall, without all that much of an explanation.

So Henry, frightened beyond belief at the thought of what lies behind the ICU doors, or rather, what might _not_ be lying behind the ICU doors, took a seat in the same chair he had occupied earlier in the afternoon and tried to calm himself.

 _They probably have a backup generator. When the power went off, they hooked his life support to it. He's still alive and well as possible in that hospital bed._

"Is your daddy here, too?"

The words had come from a little brown-haired girl, who has scooted up next to him in the chair beside him. She was wearing pink pajamas with little flowers, no shoes, and was giving him the most innocent wide-eyed stare he'd seen since Abe had been that age.

"No." It was all he could say. What kind of advice does an immortal have to give to a five-year-old about dealing with this? In his case, it would be as simple as cutting the life support-he'd be good as new, if not a little cold and wet, in two minutes' time.

"You looked all scared like Mommy did," the little girl continued, laying her head on the chair's hard plastic armrest. She laid there, staring out into the distance, lost in her own thoughts. And Henry's heart shattered-absolutely shattered-for these girls who had probably lost their father forever.

The doors swung open, and the blonde he had sat next to the day before came out, eyes just as red as before, but lacking the make-up streaks because she'd washed it all off at home before the power cut out. And her gait was lighter, just a little more hopeful.

And he still couldn't shake that feeling that he had seen her somewhere before.

She gave him a nod of acknowledgement as she gathered the two little girls, presumably her daughters. The woman stopped and whispered to him, "Don't worry, they have a generator." Henry replied with a rueful smile. He knew at that moment that they both, somehow, were tied to Adam, and he couldn't dare admit that he wanted, he _needed_ Adam to stay in that coma, while all she wanted was for her little girls to have a father again.

Wait.

 _A wife?_ Adam had a _wife_? What was she, some sort of Erika Sifrit? What sort of woman would find such a horrible, sadistic man attractive enough to court, let alone marry?

 _He was uncomfortable, and trying as hard as he could not to show it. Across the room, his Reece-ordered therapist began pouring two cups of tea. A fine British blend, Henry guessed, by the subtle scent filling the air. After the unpleasant pleasantries of sugar and milk preferences (one lump, milk first, please) and the awkwardness of being asked the most pointless of questions (is this it, is this therapy?), Henry finally had enough evidence to make a deduction of his own. He took one last look at the pictures adorning the therapist's desk._

 _"You followed your wife here."_

A deduction that he'd forgotten entirely. He knew, before he knew Lewis was Adam, that the man had a wife. And two children- _Adam, the psychopathic sadist, had children!-_ daughters, if he remembered correctly. Young. Probably about five and seven.

And eerily similar to the two unattended girls in pajamas that had been sitting right next to him.

{•*•*•*•}

He knew what he had to do.

Henry was now back in Adam's room, where the immortal lay subdued from the syringe of air that Henry had strategically aimed in his neck. His life lay on a tenuous line, a line so easily cut, that would bring him back good as new, and likely vengeful as ever. Adam was not one to take submission lightly, especially such a drastic form of submission as this.

" _Bonum vespere, Adam. Timui enim te occidissem procella. Non puto vis animo facis?" (Good evening, Adam. I thought the storm might have killed you. But you would not have minded that, would you?)_

He'd taken to speaking to the patient in Latin. If he really had been alive as long as he said, Adam knew the language perfectly well, could hear every last word that Henry spoke. And, it being a dead language, no one would be able to understand him.

" _Mox velle habebis. Videbo vos apud praedictum amnem convenere._ " _(You'll soon have your wish. See you at the river.)_

Henry then pulled the plug on the respirator. He closed his eyes, wouldn't let himself watch as the paralyzed man struggled to breathe, only listened until the breaths became harsh and choking. When it sounded as if it were too late, he plugged the device back in. No silent alarms rang at his tampering with the machine, no nurses came running. Henry left the room, grabbed the lantern and duffel bag, then proceeded back to the banks of the East River.

A few minutes later, too oxygen-deprived even with the return of the respirator, Adam flat-lined for the exorbitantly nth time in his life, then his body vanished from the bed and popped up in the pristine, moonlit waters watched carefully by a former sailor with a lantern.

{•*•*•*•}

Jillian could finally relax again. Lewis was alive, the girls were fast asleep again, the night had returned to their strange normal.

That is, until the hall phone rang.

She was half-tempted to just let it go to voicemail, but she was afraid the girls would wake up again from the noise. So Jillian begrudgingly got herself out of bed, chastised yet again Lewis's strange insistence on not owning a wireless phone, and picked up the clamoring device, offering a groggy and frustrated hello.

"Have I reached Jillian Farber?"

"Yes. Who is this?" she asked with a note of trepidation in her voice.

"Jillian, this is Dr. Jefferson at the ICU."

Jillian's heart sank. In fact, her whole body sank and she slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor of the hall, the phone cradled in her hands. She did her best to hold back the tears and quiet the sobs as the doctor told her the news she worst feared. He gave Jillian a moment to compose herself before delivering the even more shocking news.

"This is going to sound odd, but do you know why your husband's body vanished from his bed moments after he died?"

{•*•*•*•}

He gasped for air. Oh, sweet, sweet air. He took deep breaths, filling his lungs with oxygen-

He hadn't been able to breathe on his own for the better part of three weeks now.

" _Mox velle habebis. Videbo vos apud praedictum amnem convenere." The figure he could faintly see from his barely-open eyelids turned to the left and pulled some sort of cord from the wall. Each pre-supplied breath became harder to take. His body had to fight back, involuntary spasms forced the air into his lungs, forced it back out. He was choking, choking, hyper-aware of the lack of oxygen, and the sensation of the tube running down his throat made it all the more frightening. His last thought was that perhaps this was all a dream, that he would wake again in the pond outside Auschwitz to the evil grin of Mengele._

But it was not Mengele standing at the river's edge. The river wasn't even in Poland, let alone Europe, but the skyscraper-lined streets of twentieth century New York. The man walked forward, holding out something to him in the hand not toting the anachronistic oil lantern.

The dripping wet immortal slowly came out of the river, then with a sudden burst of speed, grabbed the bundle that the man with the lantern held in his hands. He wrapped the towel around his body and looked into the face of the man with the lantern.

"Henry." Adam breathed. "You actually did it. You killed me."

Adam ducked under a bush and changed into the clothes Henry had provided; just a simple t-shirt and sweats a la NYPD. If anyone from the precinct saw, they would think Henry was arresting the man. And then he'd be pulled into Reece's office and reminded that he was _not_ an active officer and thus couldn't make formal arrests.

But by one AM, no one he knew from the day shift was still on duty. So Henry led Adam out of the park and the two immortals slowly began walking down the dark streets of the city, Henry's lantern the only light cast about them.

"Why?" Adam asked at long last. "You had me in the perfect place. I didn't think you had that in you, to paralyze me. How exactly did you do that? You'll have to teach me sometime."

"So you can use it on me? I don't believe I'll be giving you that power over me anytime soon. No, Adam, I didn't do it to prove I was capable. I brought you back because I know, deep down, you still are that decent man you think you lost forever."

"Really, now? What makes you say that?"

Henry looked up at the stars that hadn't been seen in this city's night sky since the invention of the electric light. "I met them tonight when I came to see whether or not you'd died in the power outage. I'd thought you had the pictures simply as a ruse; it only seemed fitting with what little I know about you. They were so frightened, Adam, because they love you and didn't want to lose you."

Henry turned back to look at Adam. "I would assume by now the hospital has called your wife with the news. She doesn't know, does she?"

Adam shook his head. "I never thought we would last. Everyone I've met over the years, every relationship I began, nothing ever lasted. Nothing until Jillian. I've wanted to tell her, so many times, but then I'd have to tell her my whole life story. After two thousand years, there are more than a few things I'd rather keep in the grave. I didn't want you to find this side of me, Henry. I underestimated you."

"Not quite," Henry grinned. "I do believe it's time to tell your Jillian that she never has to worry about losing you again."

He motioned to the front steps of the building they were nearing; the building, Adam was startled to recognize, was the very same one in which he lived.

'You do your research well, Henry." Adam offered in a cool tone to mask his displeasured surprise. He mounted the stair and turned to look at his fellow immortal one last time. "I'm going to miss our little games. Good night, Henry."

{•*•*•*•}

There was a knock at the door. Jillian wondered how in the world the police had heard about Lewis's death so quickly, and why they felt the need to arrive at the very moment when all she wanted to do was curl up and die. The knocks persisted. She grabbed a tissue from the box next to the phone and did her feeble best to make herself look remotely presentable.

They had finally let up with questioning her. Where Lewis was found, what had happened, everything about that day three weeks prior was immediately flagged as suspicious, foul play. Did he have any enemies? Of course, he's a high-security psychiatrist. Was there anyone that wanted to kill him? There was that one patient, something Walker? Wasn't he dead now?

And now that his body had just _vanished_ … how the hell does that even happen? Of course the police would be right back to investigating. At two AM.

Her husband was dead.

Her daughters didn't have a father.

And that man outside her door was…

Jillian didn't, couldn't , wouldn't believe what she saw. She must've looked through that peephole a dozen times before she finally decided that yes, this is real, and opened the door. The man outside, with damp hair and a police-issued sweatsuit, called Adam by some and Lewis by others, caught his sobbing wife in his open arms and confirmed for her that yes, yes this is real and no, no I won't ever leave you again.

* * *

 _Remember those photos on Lewis's desk from Skinny Dipper? Yep, that's Jillian, and their daughters Annabel and Juliette. I took the liberty of naming them, hope whoever picks up the show doesn't mind(: Thoughts? Oh, and don't forget about #saveforever!_


End file.
